Dear Mrs. Fitzwilliam,
For so you remain, at least for the moment, and I don’t want to waste what might prove my last opportunity to address you with the name you were so good as to accept from me, three years ago.
This morning I received a letter from your father. Something of a shock, I’ll admit, as he has never troubled himself to address me before. Even more shocking that he wrote this singular epistle from inside the Fairfield County Jail in Stamford, Connecticut, and now, my dear wife, now I understand how I have been a fool. A fool to leave you alone like this, all these long months and years, and not to find you and speak with you and understand why you have shunned me like this. The terrible secret you have been harboring under your skin. The terrible courage with which you must have placed your hand in mine, in that long-ago churchyard in Kensington. And I did not understand. I thought—forgive me—I thought your trust and love in me must have been very weak indeed to fall away so easily under my brother’s persuasion. Now I know.
And we have a daughter. Her name is Evelyn, and she has my eyes and my smile. How I stare at those words. Daughter. Evelyn. It cannot be true, and yet your father assures me it is. I want to weep. I want to rage. I don’t know whether I adore you or hate you for granting me such a gift and then never telling me it existed. How could you? But then you could. You had to. You had this fear of me. You were afraid I was a monster, and that the terror of your own childhood would be revisited upon her. Excuse the poorness of this handwriting. I cannot seem to steady my distress.
I will return to your father’s letter.
It was long and full of fear: for you, Virginia, and your sister. He turns to me now, for all my faults, in the event he can no longer watch over your interests himself. Without my knowledge, he has investigated my affairs—I suppose that is no more than any father would do—and has changed, or at least softened, the implacability of his resolve against me. In consequence, he has bequeathed me a sum of money with which he hopes to purchase my loyalty. He promises more if certain conditions are met.
It is a strange letter, and stranger still that it should arrive at such a moment, as I contemplate the balance sheet before me and realize that I have no choice but to take some kind of action, or lose everything for which I have labored these past few years.
I shall have my wife at last. And now I shall have a daughter, too.
My fingers are shaking so fiercely, I can hardly hold this pen. I am filled with a strange exhilaration, as if I have caught at last that tide in the affairs of man, to which Shakespeare urged us.
I am not making any sense, am I? Fear not, my beloved. I shall explain everything when the time comes.
And in the interim, my dear, you are not to worry if you haven’t heard from me for some time. You are not to think that I have succumbed to any ill. I am only doing what must be done, as I have always done when faced with obstacles. I am determined to win back what I have lost, even if this gamble requires the most desperate stakes I have yet had the courage to summon.
But then, only the brave deserve the fair.
Still (and ever) your own
S.F.
Chapter 25
Cocoa, Florida, July 1922
The small body cowering on the floor of the foyer might belong to my sister-in-law, but she’s not the Clara I remember. Not the Clara who drove confidently down the drive of Maitland Plantation a month ago.
I sink next to her and take her cheeks in my hands. “Clara! My God! Are you all right?”
“You’re hurt!”
“It’s nothing, nothing. But you!”
I stroke her dirty hair, her bruised little face. Her wan skin.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “As long as you’re safe. Are you? You look like hell.”
“So do you!”
“I’ve been living in a hole in the ground for the past four weeks, that’s why. A damned hole!”
“Where?”
“Somewhere between here and Maitland.”
“But what happened?”
“I escaped, of course. What do you think?”
I stare at her, amazed, and she returns my stare and laughs. “Oh, that hurts!” she says, and goes on laughing, holding her stomach, and I start to laugh, too. Laughing and crying together. “A hole in the ground?” I gasp.
“A basement. These terrible men—”
“Who? What men?”
“Oh, darling . . .”
Evelyn walks in, hair all tousled, and we turn to her in the same movement. “Dolly gone,” she says, starting to cry. “Where my dolly?”
Clara holds out her arms.
“Evvie, darling!”
And Evelyn runs straight into her auntie’s embrace.
I find the kitchen and boil water for tea, while Clara runs a bath. The room is the absolute latest, all hygienic sanitary tiles and fitted metal cabinets, like a laboratory. A new Western Electric range squats in the corner on its four curved legs. Evelyn tugs on my dressing gown and tell me she’s hungry. I pour her a glass of milk from the icebox. Slice bread and butter it thickly. Everything’s fresh, and yet I haven’t seen a maid. A bowl of green apples rests on the marble-topped table in the center of the room. I cut one apple into pieces and Evelyn eats them all, one by one. The lost doll seems to have been forgotten.
“Now, that’s better,” Clara says, wandering through the doorway, sitting at the table. She’s wearing an ice-white robe and her head is wrapped in a towel. “Your turn. I’ll watch Evelyn.”
I lift my right hand. “But my bandage!”
“Just hold it out of the tub.” She puts the tea in the strainer and the strainer in the cup, and she pours the hot water over all, just as if she’s not sitting there wearing a bruise along her jaw, wearing pale, fresh-scrubbed skin and wide, exhausted eyes. When I continue to stand there, smoothing my hands on the sides of my dressing gown, she looks up. “Go on! You’ll feel much better. We can’t think clearly until you’re fresh and clean.”
“Think clearly about what?”
“What’s to be done, of course. We can’t let them win. They’ll kill us if we do.”
I want to ask her who, but I suppose I already know the answer. There is only one who here, isn’t there?
Only one man who wants my money badly enough to kill for it.
She’s right, you know, even if I don’t quite understand what she means by thinking clearly until I emerge from the bedroom half an hour later, wearing a skirt and blouse and cardigan and black stockings, skin scrubbed and hair brushed, teeth cleaned and stomach actually hungry. Dizzy, weak, restless. Hand hurting, head hurting. But more recognizably Virginia than at any moment in the past month.
Clara’s moved to the parlor with the tea. She sits on the sofa next to Evelyn and turns the pages of a book, while Evelyn points out everything in the pictures. When she sees me, she smiles and reaches for the teapot.
“So, my love. What’s happened to you?”
“You first.”
“Oh, darling. It’s so much to explain.”